DAW Color Mesh App:Futureproofing the Data Update Process

DAW’s important aim is to continuously improve customer satisfaction and experience—not only with new and sustainable product innovations, but also through optimizing behind-the-scenes processes, webshops, design software, digitalization, and AI. The efficient use of data is a focus area for innovation.

The company has chosen One Data as its technical partner for one of its latest data management projects. Using the software’s ability to create reusable data products, DAW wanted to automate the process of updating its central data store. The goal was to make the process more efficient, scalable, and reliable.

To do this, the color data for all items must be accurate, reliable, and continuously updated, and any changes must be distributed to all markets, web shops, etc. Until recently, an Excel and SQL database-based solution was used to supply key customer tools in the German market with the necessary product information, resulting in a highly manual, time-consuming process. Due to the DAW’s growth and new evolving requirements the existing pipeline now needed to be replaced with extensions to web stores and product configurators.

The goal of deploying One Data was to eliminate the creation of single-use data products and transform them into reusable data products that are automated, more efficient, robust, and quality-assured while reducing manual effort. This provides greater efficiency, consistency, and agility in data-driven decision making, fosters cross-functional collaboration, and supports cost-effective innovation.

First, all relevant data and source systems were integrated into One Data and the data pipeline that previously existed was migrated to One Data. As a result, the process of delivering data to the central data store is now fully automated—including automatic preparation and quality checks—ensuring high quality of the final data products.

The next step was to create a visual data map that allows Product Data Owner and specialists to easily identify data quality issues. The map includes detailed information on all items and their ingredients, as well as quality measures. A quality summary makes data quality measurable and transparent in DAW’s product data update process.

Ultimately, the two user groups that use these differently: Product Data Owners look at their respective products, with data from many assets attached to each product. This data is therefore brought together in the DAW Color Mesh App to provide a horizontal view of the assets. The specialist departments who provide the data look at individual data tables. The data map gives them a vertical perspective on that information.

If a Product Data Owner finds an error in the data for his articles, he can report it to the color department. Quality issues that come from source systems, can easily be identified and then reliably solved in the source system where they originated. In this way, the Quality App enables data owners and specialist departments to improve the quality of product data independently.

This ensures that the central data store is always populated with high-quality, up-to-date data for all existing and new items, while reducing manual effort. The end result is faster and better product data updates and a seamless sales process for retailers.

Data products help DAW to automatically maintain data quality and input data from different source systems. The targeted data products created in One Data contain automatically cleaned and up-to-date item data required for central points, such as web shops and tinting machines.

Another goal is to gradually transfer data ownership and quality responsibility to the business. The data processing structure of the previous solution was successfully captured and mapped, and the quality of the source data was visualized.

As a result, the process of updating the database for all items has become much more robust, with a significant reduction in manual work. This ensures that the points of sale are supplied with the most up-to-date and reliable data, which improves product supply, ordering, and ultimately customer satisfaction, enabling new sales potential to be exploited.

With the Color Mesh App, DAW will be able to shorten their web shop update cycles, improve data quality, and gain visibility into internal processes and data sources. In addition, the company will improve customer satisfaction and increase its competitiveness—ensuring that you get a bucket of Alpina reliably and in the exact color you want in no time.

In the future, DAW plans to build and reuse more of these innovative data products to gradually become a Data Mesh organization—and thus be at the forefront of innovation in data handling.